The Last Werewolf
by Bottlebrush
Summary: The War is over and Voldemort is dead. Remus Lupin sets himself one last task.


Title: The Last Werewolf

Rating: T

Disclaimer: I don't own the Harry Potter world or its characters. J. K. Rowling does.

Summary: The War is over, and Voldemort is dead. Remus Lupin sets himself one final task.

"Wait," the girl had told him. "The head man is coming, maybe six o'clock, you wait for him, okay?"

Remus Lupin sat on the ground, leaning against a tree which shaded him from the hot sun. He had been waiting, in a sense, for eight years. A few more hours would make little difference.

It had been eight years since the War ended, Voldemort defeated and finally dead. Remus had been somewhat surprised and not particularly pleased to find himself still alive at the end of it. With the Order disbanded, and Dumbledore gone – one of the War's last casualties – Remus had a freedom he had never wished for; but such was the situation, and he had to make the best of it. So he had set himself a task, one especially relevant to him.

It had involved some of the things he did best – nosing about, collecting information, making connections between seemingly unrelated snippets of fact. It had also involved associating himself with some of the people he had spent most of his life avoiding: werewolves of the vicious sort, the kind who took the Wolfbane potion not to render themselves harmless, but so that they could experience the wolf's activity with their human minds, and so fully appreciate and enjoy the hunting down and killing and eating of human beings. He wandered among packs of feral werewolves where wizards and Muggles mingled, their differences forgotten in their shared experiences. He found few kindred spirits there, but whom he could, he befriended. He asked few questions, and those cautiously, obliquely, but always he listened. He heard many things, and forgot nothing. Most of what he heard turned out to be false, or irrelevant, but he filed everything away in his memory. He followed every trail that looked remotely promising; they took him to strange places where sometimes he encountered interesting people, but never the one he sought. Until, perhaps, now. Since nearing this village, he had felt a tingle of anticipation which experience told him _might_ mean he was on the right track.

The girl who had spoken to him before was sitting a few yards away from him, beside the closed door of a hut. Another girl sat at the other side of the door. Both were dressed in white, and wore fine silver chains around their necks, wrists and ankles. They were busy with intricate crochet work. Now and then one of them would look up and smile at Remus, who smiled back. He was fairly sure both of them were witches.

The afternoon wore on; dogs snoozed under the trees, chickens scratched in the dust, and at one point a few children came laughing and chattering into the village, looking at Remus with curiosity but not approaching him. They were well-fed, healthy-looking, and uniformed, the boys in khaki shorts and shirts, the girls in bright blue dresses.

The sun was setting with tropical swiftness when a man – younger than Remus expected, perhaps forty – appeared pushing a bicycle into the village. The two girls jumped up and ran towards him, talking rapidly and pointing to Remus.

The head man approached Remus, who stood up and waited in silence.

"I hear you wish to speak with Namfumu," the man said in his own language.

"Yes. I have come a long way for that purpose," Remus answered.

"What do you want with her? Do you know her?"

"I wish to ask her some questions. There are things she may be able to tell me."

"Namfumu is very wise. She knows many things. She knows when it will rain, and how hard, and for how long. She tells us when to plant our crops, and the best places for planting, and she is never wrong. And since she has been with us, no woman has died in childbirth, and no child has been born dead. But these things do not concern you. I have long feared that when it became known that a white woman lived here, the white men would come to take her away, although she does not wish to go, and we do not wish to lose her."

"I have not come to take her away," Remus said.

"Truly?" the man asked, with a trace of sarcasm. "You are not going to claim she is your mother and must go away with you?"

"If she is the one I seek, she is too old to be the mother of anyone living," Remus answered.

The man looked down, thoughtfully, and when he raised his eyes again, he regarded Remus with new respect.

"You are not as ignorant as I supposed," he said. "If Namfumu agrees, you may speak with her."

He addressed a few words to the girls, who had stopped crocheting and were listening with interest to the men's conversation. One girl got up and went into the hut, and when she came out she was smiling.

"You may go in now, Namfumu will hear you," she said.

There was no window inside the hut. The only light came from a single candle. The woman was very old, barely five feet tall, with a wrinkled face, pure white hair and dark, sunken eyes. Like the girls outside, she wore a simple white dress. From the chain around her neck hung what at first appeared to be silver coins, but it soon became apparent that they represented phases of the moon, from thin crescents like toenail cuttings to full discs. She stood before Remus, calm, waiting. The tingle had become almost a tremor of excitement. This was she. He _knew_. The emanation of magical strength from her was overwhelming. The powers of Voldemort and Dumbledore combined would scarcely equal it.

"Am I to call you Namfumu?" he asked in the language of the villagers, although he suspected her original tongue was Greek. "Or will you tell me your name?"

When she replied in English, he was surprised, though he realised he should not have been. "You may call me Selene. That is not the name my parents gave me, but it is one I chose for myself. And yours?"

"Remus Lupin. And that _is_ the name my parents gave me," he said with a small smile.

"They were Seers?"

"No."

"I think one of them must have been, perhaps without knowing it."

"Perhaps."

"And what do you want with me, Remus Lupin?"

"To ask your reasons for ruining my life, before I kill you."

Selene's eyes widened at that, and she went for her wand; but it was already swinging idly from Remus's left hand.

"I underestimated you," she said. "You are sharper than you look. But I do not see a ruined life. I see one who has succeeded in most of his undertakings, and who has loved and been loved intensely."

"And do you also see the agony I have suffered all my life, and the fear that never leaves me, the fear I might kill someone or pass on this curse? This curse you laid on me, although I have done nothing to you, _nothing._"

"And now you will kill me? Or will you at least hear me out first?"

"I came in the hope of hearing you. I wish to understand."

"Yes……it is a force that drives you, the wish to understand, is it not? Well, understand this. I was born some – oh, about 26 centuries ago. I was beautiful once, can you believe that? My eyes were large and bright, my hair was black and thick and shiny, my face was round and pale like the full moon. My parents were wealthy, we owned land and slaves, and my father was a leader in the community. I had two sisters and four brothers, and I was the youngest. My parents loved me dearly, and perhaps they were over lenient with me. When I approached marriageable age, I told them it was my wish to live and die a virgin. My father thought this not an unworthy ambition, and my mother thought it a girlish whim I would outgrow. Both agreed to indulge me. My sisters and brothers had made good marriages and were already providing the grandchildren that all parents crave.

One day, my father was away attending to business at the law court, and my mother was visiting my second sister who was about to give birth to her first child. I was alone with the house slaves, who had been in our service all their lives and whom we trusted completely. I was picking flowers in the field outside our house, when a stranger came by, a young man who said he had been travelling all day. He begged a cup of water. I invited him into the kitchen, and told the maid to bring him something to eat and drink, and went outside again, leaving him there. Shortly afterwards he came out and approached me in an unseemly manner. I repulsed him, but he forced himself on me most brutally and despite my screams no-one came to my aid. I know now that he was a wizard and had used magic to lock the slaves inside the house, but then I only knew pain and rage. Until that moment I had no idea I was a witch, but the power rose up in me as soon as he dragged his loathsome body from mine. I had no wand then, and no need of one. I cursed him with all my strength. He had behaved like an animal, so I cursed him to become one. He had violated my womanhood, so I cursed him to suffer under the power of the moon, as women do. He had caused me pain, so I cursed him with greater pain. He had abused my hospitality, so I cursed him to be shunned and turned away from every door. And even that was not enough; I cursed him to multiply the curse. In that moment, I wanted to make the whole world suffer."

"So you have cursed innocent people, thousands of them, women and children too. Does that please you?"

"No, of course it does not. But that is how it is. Now kill me, Remus Lupin, if you will."

He would not use an Unforgivable, of course. He would put her in a body bind and use his knife. It would be quick, she would not suffer much, nothing like the suffering she had caused him and countless others.

A memory came to him; a boy, wise beyond his years. "I don't reckon my dad would've wanted his best friends to become killers." Would Harry want him to kill this old woman? _And what would _you_ want, Sirius, if you could see me now? If you_ can_ see me now?_ Murder for revenge was a grave sin, however you looked at it. Killing this woman who had lived so far beyond her time - if the motive was revenge, _that_ was bad, that might damn his soul, it might separate him from Sirius for ever and that would be damnation indeed.

"What are you waiting for?" she asked defiantly. "Take your freedom, isn't that what you came for?"

"I came for knowledge, and vengeance. I don't know what you mean by freedom."

"Ha, so there is _something_ you don't know. I maintained my bodily life these thousands of years by the magical power that is in me, and that same power maintains the curse. When I die, you will cease to be cursed, and those others you speak of will likewise be freed."

Of course. He should have known. Now it was his _duty_ to kill her, to end this curse, for all the werewolves now living and all who would otherwise come after. That was more important than the life of one woman, and more important than the soul of Remus Lupin. If he had to sacrifice his hope of happiness in the life to come, so be it. Still he hesitated. He had killed before, in battle; he had felt only bleak satisfaction on killing Rudolphus Lestrange and McNair, and regret at leaving Bellatrix to Neville. But to murder an old woman in cold blood……the indecision that had dogged him all his life overcame him. He could not bring himself to do it. It was not fear of the consequences that held him back now, it just seemed _wrong._ Helplessly he lowered his wand and turned to go.

"Wait, Remus Lupin," Selene called. "Will you let me look at you? _Really_ look?"

He understood her, nodded assent, and braced himself for the onslaught of Legilimency which swept through his mind with a force he had never before encountered. It was with almost physical pain he felt her probing into every crevice of his mental being, uncovering the secrets even he had not known were there. At last she left him.

"I'm sorry," she said simply.

He had heard those words hundreds of times, from students who were sorry they hadn't done their homework or who had tried to hex a classmate in the corridor; from a lover who had said the same thing after leaving the top off the toothpaste tube that he had said after trying to feed Severus Snape to him. But he had never heard them said with such true repentance.

"I understand now what I've done," she said. "I didn't know there were people like you. What I've done to you – I know it now. I was wrong. If I could go back in time and undo it, I would. I don't forgive that man. Never in all eternity will I forgive him. I'm glad I cursed him. But the others – I would give my centuries of life to make it not have happened, if I could."

"You were a child. You didn't know what you were doing. I was wrong to blame you. Live in peace."

He left the hut, and handed Selene's wand to one of the beaming round-faced girls, telling her to give it back to her mistress. On his way out of the village he saw the head man sitting outside his hut, and thanked him.

On the night of the next full moon, Remus for the first time stood upright as a man and stared at it. It was bright and cold and beautiful. Perhaps this meant Selene was dead, having killed herself in her remorse. Or perhaps she had simply used her magic to remove the curse.

Later that night he dreamed of Sirius, one of those treasured dreams of love and joy that came to him still from time to time, and from which he woke with renewed hope.


End file.
